A New And Ancient Story: The Podcast

In this episode, Charles talks with author, podcaster, and life-long seeker Joanna Harcourt-Smith.

This is a conversation with the political thinker and activist Helena Norberg-Hodge. She had a huge radicalizing influence on my political thinking through her film Ancient Futures. By "radical" I don't mean the usual leftist politics. Helena is a tireless advocate for re-localization, the reclaiming of the commons, and the importance of direct participation in community. She is deeply insightful in linking these to global issues. Having spent decades in Ladakh, she is also one of the first to integrate traditional and indigenous world-views into a coherent critique of techno-industrial society, finance, and politics. Her work has been a great source of nourishment to me in unfolding a vision of a more beautiful world. I hope you enjoy this conversation we recorded in the fall of 2016 in England.

Satish Kumar is, in the truest sense of the word, an elder in the peace and ecology movement. To me personally, he is one of those deep allies who confirms that the most radical ideas I work with are not in fact crazy. It was my honor to weave this tapestry of conversation with him. We spoke about gift culture and the natural order; value, values, and the standardization of everything; the perils of over-reliance on metrics; speaking to power and preaching to the converted; gratitude and contentment, and much more.

Martin Shaw is a mythologist and storyteller from the area of Devon, England. He and I share a deep appreciation for the way myth and story shape the world. Martin starts our conversation with a story about Fox Woman Dreaming that is still with me months later, working inside me. We go on to talk about exile, the nature of magic, stories and relationship, decolonizing the imagination, and lots more. It was a really heady and passionate conversation.

This podcast is a public conversation between me and Orland Bishop, recorded in Santos, Brazil. Even though the audio quality isn't perfect, I want to release this recording anyway in hopes of transmitting to you some of what Orland has transmitted to me. He draws from a deep pool of wisdom that is carried not only by his words, but by the voice beneath them. I don't use phrases like "deep pool of wisdom" very often, and in this case it is not a cliche. We talk about gift and relationship; the power of word, story, and intention; money and the financial system, and other topics. You might sometimes find Orland hard to understand. That's OK. Just let the words reverberate in you.

Kelly Brogan is a psychiatrist who made a radical break with pharma-centered orthodoxy to pursue holistic approaches to mental health, with extraordinary results. We recorded a conversation that started with psychiatric drugs and visited many perennial topics: working inside versus outside the system; the importance of community, the blunting of consciousness in our society and the power of grief to restore it; and the recovery of our power as agents of planetary change. I hope you enjoy this deep and playful conversation as much as I did. Note: Here is the link to Kelly's online program for anyone who is intrigued by what Kelly shares about it in this conversation. http://kellybroganmd.com/vitalmind/

This podcast is a recording of a second conversation between me and Rupert Sheldrake, one of my favorite renegade scientists and the number one target of the defenders of scientific orthodoxy. He hardly needs any introduction, but I'll say he is prolific author and researcher with a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Cambridge University. I see him as an elder or a pioneer in the liberating of science from its metaphysical dogmas of reductionism and mechanistic materialism, and a true practitioner of the Scientific Method in its original humble spirit. I hope you'll enjoy the intellect and refinement of this man as much as I did.

St.JamesTalk by Charles Eisenstein

The Fertile Ground of Bewilderment was the title of a speech I gave at St. James Church in London. I'm sharing it with you all because it was such a high-energy event and I ventured into territory I haven't brought into public speaking before.

This interview with the filmmaker Marietta Schürholz is on ritual -- a topic about which I've thought a lot and written very little. We tend to think rituals are vestiges of an earlier, more superstitious time, or perhaps elements of indigenous cultures that we need to learn from. We think we live in a society bereft of meaningful rituals. But in fact, we are immersed in rituals that are invisible to us. Medicine, law, and even technology can be understood as a highly elaborated system of ritual, whose legitimacy and efficacy are based on an underlying mythology that tells us what is real and how the world works. As we transition into a new mythology, our old rituals become unsatisfying, and impotent to address the crises of our time. This podcast episode originated as an interview for Marietta's film, Reinventing Rituals. You can watch the trailer at www.reinventing-rituals.de. The depth of understanding embodied in her questions, and her wide open heart and vulnerable listening to my responses, makes me th

This conversation with the Norwegian men's coach and teacher Eivind Skjellum is a deep and at times raw introduction to an extraordinary transformational map Eivind has created (or, more accurately, that he has discovered). Created for men, I think it has impact on anyone who encounters it. The places he describes carry a profound psychic resonance: the City of Slumber, the Point of No Return, the Meeting with the Mapmaker of the East, the Abyss, the Demon's Feast, the Beauty Path, the Encounter with the Black Knight, and many more. This conversation is part of my online learning journey, Masculinity: A New Story. If you'd like to access the entire series, you can do that here: https://newandancientstory.net/learning-journeys/masculinity-a-new-story/.

What would you think if your 4-year-old displayed thorough knowledge of WWII aircraft, without having ever been exposed to them? Carol Bowman is a prominent past life researcher who focuses on the past life memories of children. She recounts three extraordinary cases in this conversation, that call into question the conventional brain-dependent understanding of what consciousness is. Because they are so disruptive to basic scientific paradigms, stories like these have long been dismissed as hoaxes, suggestion, confabulation, and so on. Will you also dismiss them out of hand? Or will you entertain the possibility of their authenticity and see where that may lead?

What are the perils of working "in the system" as opposed to trying to change it from the outside? In this multidimensional conversation, Lyla and I expand and perhaps transcend that question. We weave together topics as seemingly divergent as Peak Oil, recovering dying languages, the "emperor's new clothes" syndrome, and the importance of small, barely visible actions that contradict what is normal or realistic. The poetry and insight of this young woman is not to be missed.

This podcast was recorded in late November 2015 at Cynthia Jurs' "kiva" in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Originally meant to be a recorded discussion between Charles and David Abram (philosopher/author of The Spell of the Sensuous andBecoming Animal), what arose was a round-table discussion with all of the participants (listed below). We divided the conversation into two, one-hour segments: Part I touches on many different topics including: urgency and scarcity; biological determinism; eros, compassion, and beauty; intellectual and academic silos; our cultural legacy for future generations; complexity and simplicity; human-generated meaning vs. received meaning, and the importance of reclaiming language. Part II is a multi-faceted discussion on the topic of indigineity, the imposition of the written word on oral culture, as well as a discussion on the metaphysics of separation. Participants include (other than Charles): Cynthia Jurs, David Abram, Pat McCabe (Woman Stands Shining), Lyla June Johnson, David Bacon, E

This podcast was recorded in late November 2015 at Cynthia Jurs' "kiva" in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Originally meant to be a recorded discussion between Charles and David Abram (philosopher/author of The Spell of the Sensuous andBecoming Animal), what arose was a round-table discussion with all of the participants (listed below). We divided the conversation into two, one-hour segments: Part I touches on many different topics including: urgency and scarcity; biological determinism; eros, compassion, and beauty; intellectual and academic silos; our cultural legacy for future generations; complexity and simplicity; human-generated meaning vs. received meaning, and the importance of reclaiming language. Part II is a multi-faceted discussion on the topic of indigineity, the imposition of the written word on oral culture, as well as a discussion on the metaphysics of separation. Participants include (other than Charles): Cynthia Jurs, David Abram, Pat McCabe (Woman Stands Shining), Lyla June Johnson, David Baco

Here is a conversation with a group gathered for Charles' birthday at "Seppi's Place," which is kind of a new story waystation for people, especially young people, to develop in ways that society's institutions don't support. We envision a network of such places developing around the country and around the world; permaculture centers, coworking spaces, social enterprise incubators, places of healing, art, and music... places to start walking a different path. Find out more about Seppi's Place: seppisplace.com Join Our Community: newandancientstory.net

Rupert Sheldrake is one of the most thoughtful, lucid people I have ever met. In this conversation we talk about the foundations of science, both as an institution and as a path to knowledge. Like all the institutions of modernity, science faces a crisis that is increasingly recognized within science itself. Part of it is the "replicability crisis," but as Rupert and I discuss, that is but a gateway into deeper epistemological and metaphysical problems. Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist and author, is best known for his hypothesis of morphic fields and morphic resonance, which leads to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory. Find out more on his website: http://www.sheldrake.org/ Join our community: www.newandancientstory.net

Charles speaks with Brown Koroskenyi and Pamela Lyness of the Avatar Centre, an experimental community in the Amazon dedicated to recovering knowledge of how to live harmoniously with the land. Of course, we needn't go to the Amazon to do this, but each place on earth has its own unique medicine. What are the gifts of the Amazon, when we no longer seek to strip it of the wealth we call "natural resources"? Join Our community: www.newandancientstory.net Avatar Centre's website: www.avatarcentre.com Avatar Centre's Facebook: www.facebook.com/theavatarcentre

Charles speaks with life coaching legend Julio Olalla about the power of gratitude, and more generally, the role of story and perception in forming the ground from which actions arise. Julio shares an amazing story of synchronicity and gratitude that also hints at the world-changing effects of choices that, in the moment, might seem insignificant. "The fact that we have stopped listening to the universe and nature has created in us an age of solitude, because there are no other voices, only human voices." - Julio Olalla "When anybody is in gratitude, every perception is different and every response to a situation is different. It colors your whole world. And the things that we try so hard to achieve become either irrelevant or effortless." - Charles Eisenstein Julio Olalla, founder and president of The Newfield Network, is a master at generating learning environments that establish the trust, safety, respect, and well-being that accelerate the potential for new thinking and action. Julio's website: http:/

A conversation with Chris Martenson, creator of the Crash Course, who like I have has moved beyond (way beyond) economics to explore systems change and narrative change. We talk about real wealth and fake wealth, community, technology, healing, and the impossible. A deep dive!